Whaleoil down due to DOS attack

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Controversial right wing website, Whaleoil, has been taken offline by a cyber attack and its editor has received death threats after he labelled a West Coast man killed in a car crash “feral”.

A denial of service (DOS) attack started last night, temporarily disabling the blog, and continued today, the website left completely unavailable since 8am.

“We are pretty certain it is from New Zealand. We are also pretty certain, due to the fact that they are skiting about it on Facebook, that it is these ferals on the West Coast,” Whaleoil’s editor Cameron Slater said.

A DOS attack is intended to block a website from its intended users by overloading the site with requests so it cannot be visited by legitimate traffic.

Slater has also received numerous death threats in text messages and on Facebook after a blog in which he described Westcoast man Judd Hall who died on Saturday as a “feral” was reportered in the Greymouth Star.

“They are pretty hot under the collar. I wrote a post about that munter who died smacking into that house and a Greymouth Star journalist beat it all up and that set them off in their feral ways,” Slater said.

He posted one of the text message threats to his Facebook page that said "we are coming for you" and "we know where you live."

There have been around 250 Facebook messages “imploring me to kill myself or that they are going to come round and kill me in lots of different manners,” Slater said.

The threats have been reported to police.

It was initially believed that the DOS attack was from the sub-continent after another blog on the site revealed India web traffic to the news site Scoop.

“Now with the gloating that is going on from the West Coast ferals we are pretty certain it is them that are involved in it,” Slater said.

The website should be back online shortly but the DOS attack has left Slater without a large amount of advertising income.

“I don’t discuss my revenues. It is basically a day and a half of revenue,” he said.

A DOS attack is illegal under the Crimes Act and is punishable with up to seven years in prison.